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The World: Top Secret; When Government Doesn't Tell

MORE than any of its recent predecessors, this administration has a penchant for secrecy.

The Bush White House has steadfastly refused to tell Congress about contacts last year between corporate executives and a task force to develop energy policy headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Last week, the General Accounting Office, the investigative agency of Congress, announced it would sue the White House to obtain the information, the first time it has ever filed such a suit.

That is only the most recent example of the Bush administration's keeping material from becoming public. Some of these moves, of course, are related to the attacks of Sept. 11. For example, President Bush determined that accused terrorists could be tried in secret military tribunals.

The government has also refused to reveal the identities or nationalities of the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters held captive at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or the names and locations of hundreds of immigrants imprisoned in the United States, because the authorities insist they might be able to cast light on the terrorism.

''Proclamation of a wartime crisis automatically increases the amount of government secrecy,'' said former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote a book in 1998 about excessive secrecy in Washington.

But the Bush team's inclination to keep information under wraps goes far beyond the reaction to terrorist attacks or even what can be regarded as traditional efforts to conduct delicate government affairs out of the limelight.

''This administration has a knee-jerk response -- reflexive secrecy,'' said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a research center at George Washington University.

Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists, said he knew of no previous administration so determined to withhold routine information. Last month, Mr. Aftergood sued the government to gain access to the Central Intelligence Agency's budget for 1947 -- data he has been denied even though the 1997 and 1998 C.I.A. budgets have been declassified and are public.

Last year, to the dismay of historians, Mr. Bush signed an executive order restricting public access to the papers of former presidents. Attorney General John Ashcroft also established more restrictive rules governing what agencies release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The government is even refusing to give Congress the results of a survey taken after the 2000 census to calculate how many people were either missed or double-counted by the census takers -- data that has nothing to do with national security, law enforcement, confidential communications or any other normal grounds for keeping data from Congress. The Commerce Department says it is not confident the figures are accurate.

Exactly why the administration is so tightfisted with so many kinds of information is something of a mystery. One administration lawyer offered a theory. He said Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney want to right a balance they believe has tilted much too far toward Congress, largely because of precedents established when President Bill Clinton misused executive authority by trying to keep matters secret to cover up wrongdoing. The same thing happened, for the same reason, in the Nixon administration, the lawyer said. He recalled that Mr. Cheney had been chief of staff for President Gerald R. Ford and familiar with a White House playing a weak hand against Congress.

As essential as openness is in a democracy -- without it public officials could never fully gain the consent of the governed because there would be no way to hold officials accountable -- no one doubts that some democratic processes require secrecy. Clearly, for example, diplomatic negotiations and grand jury proceedings cannot take place in public, and taxes could not be collected if returns were not confidential.

Those cases are easy to recognize, like night and day, said Dennis F. Thompson, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard who has written widely about government secrecy. But other cases are more like dusk, Mr. Thompson said. Usually, as in the case of the energy task force, they involve efforts by the White House to withhold information sought by political opponents that might embarrass the president or hamper his policies.

Mr. Bush asserts he is withholding details about Mr. Cheney's task force to protect the right of a president to get unvarnished confidential advice. ''We're not going to let the ability for us to discuss matters between ourselves to become eroded,'' he told reporters last week. ''It's not only important for us, for this administration. It's an important principle for future administrations.''

David M. Walker, who as comptroller general heads the accounting office, said he was not after confidential advice. He was not asking for minutes or transcripts of what was said at the task force meetings. What Congress wants, Mr. Walker said, is merely the names of the participants and the dates, times and topics of the meetings, information he said was essential for Congress to fulfill its duty to oversee the activities of the executive branch.

AS is so often the case, these arguments about principle mask a political dispute. Democrats would like to show that Mr. Cheney and his colleagues met extensively with major campaign contributors and froze environmentalists out. The White House would like to limit any disclosures that call further attention to the administration's ties to oil and gas companies, particularly to the Enron Corporation.

But the philosophical clash between the executive and legislative branches over access to information is also real and important, a conflict fought in almost every administration since George Washington refused to give Congress papers about a disastrous battle with Indians in the Northwest Territory. Usually these disputes are eventually settled by a compromise that allows both sides to claim victory.

Leaving politics aside, the line between what information should be kept confidential and what should be revealed to Congress and the public is hard to draw. Mark J. Rozell, a professor of politics at Catholic University and an expert on executive privilege, said the basic principle in a democracy should be that the presumption is in favor of openness and information is kept secret ''only in the service of some absolutely clear national interest.''

Professor Thompson of Harvard suggested that a distinction could often be made between the advice and the formulation of policy. A president, he said, should be able to keep advice secret, but ''it's very important for citizens to know the reasoning that goes on behind policymaking and not just the final decisions.''

Such prescriptions may be useful in the abstract, but are hard to apply to specific cases. For when it comes to the president and Congress, politics can rarely be left aside.